Hey Stas,
Thanks for digging into this and writing it down! Would there be any drawback with the following steps as way forward and possibility to learn more as we go? 1. We return results for the Lexeme namespace only when people explicitly select it 2. We get feedback 3. We go the "Best possible query" route when people select all namespaces 4. We get feedback 5. We go the "Best possible query" route for all searches if feedback indicates this is useful (I don't know at this point)
Cheers Lydia On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 2:26 AM Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi!
While working on fulltext search for Lexemes, I have encountered a question which I think needs to be discussed and resolved. The question is how fulltext search should be working when dealing with different content models and what search should do by default and in specialized cases.
The main challenge in Wikidata is that we are dealing with substantially different content models - articles, Items (including Properties, because while being formally different type, they are similar enough to Items for search to ignore the difference) and Lexemes organize their data in a different way, and should be searched using different specialized queries. This is currently unique for Wikidata, but SDC might eventually have the same challenge to deal with. I've described challenges and questions there are here in more detail:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Smalyshev_(WMF)/Wikidata_search#Fulltext_...
I'd like to first hear some feedback about what are the expectations about the combined search are - what is expected to work, how it is expected to work, what are the defaults, what are the use cases for these. I have outlined some solutions that were proposed on wiki, if you have any comments please feel welcome to respond either here or on wiki.
TLDR version of it is that doing search on different data models is hard, and we would need to sacrifice something to make it work. We need to figure out and decide which of these sacrifices are acceptable and what is enabled/disabled by default.
Thanks,
Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org